NEWS FEEDS

The RCJ provides RSS
feeds from well-respected news organizations, giving
our readers a convenient
portal through which to stay abreast of world
events and issues. Use the links provided. The
following are on the RCJ Front Page Report homepage
(scroll both columns to the right).

CCJ Publisher Rick Alan Rice dissects
the building of America in a trilogy of novels
collectively calledATWOOD. Book One explores
the development of the American West through the
lens of public policy, land planning, municipal
development, and governance as it played out in one
of the new counties of Kansas in the latter half of
the 19th Century. The novel focuses on the religious
and cultural traditions that imbued the American
Midwest with a special character that continues to
have a profound effect on American politics to this
day. Book One creates an understanding about
America's cultural foundations that is further
explored in books two and three that further trace
the historical-cultural-spiritual development of one
isolated county on the Great Plains that stands as
an icon in the development of a certain brand of
American character. That's the serious stuff viewed
from high altitude. The story itself gets down and
dirty with the supernatural, which inATWOOD
- A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliveranceis the
outfall of misfires in human interactions, from the
monumental to the sublime.The
book features the epic poem"The
Toiler"as
well as artwork by New Mexico artist Richard
Padilla.

Elmore Leonard Meets Larry McMurtry

Western Crime Novel

I am
offering another novel through Amazon's Kindle
Direct Publishing service. Cooksin is the story of a criminal
syndicate that sets its sights on a ranching/farming
community in Weld County, Colorado, 1950. The
perpetrators of the criminal enterprise steal farm
equipment, slaughter cattle, and rob the personal
property of individuals whose assets have been
inventoried in advance and distributed through a
vast system of illegal commerce.

It is a ripping good
yarn, filled with suspense and intrigue. This was
designed intentionally to pay homage to the type of
creative works being produced in 1950, when the
story is set. Richard
Padilla has done his usually brilliant
work in capturing the look and feel of a certain
type of crime fiction being produced in that era.
The whole thing has the feel of those black & white
films you see on Turner Movie Classics, and the
writing will remind you a little of Elmore Leonard,
whose earliest works were westerns.
Use this link.

EXPLORE THE KINDLE
BOOK LIBRARY

If you have not explored the books
available from Amazon.com's Kindle Publishing
division you would do yourself a favor to do so. You
will find classic literature there, as well as tons
of privately published books of every kind. A lot of
it is awful, like a lot of traditionally published
books are awful, but some are truly classics. You
can get the entire collection of Shakespeare's works
for two bucks.

Amazon is the largest,
but far from the only digital publisher. You can
find similar treasure troves atNOOK Press(the
Barnes & Noble site),Lulu,
and others.

AFGHANISTAN

Why Are We in
Afghanistan?

Journey to the Center of the Future

The Taliban
is sitting atop one of the world's few known concentrations
of Rare Earth Minerals
- in the case of the small village of Khan Neshin (below),
ceriumandneodymium - and that gives
these backwards Islamic fundamentalists a big say in the
future of the world's technological development. Weird,
right? It may also help explain why the U.S. is in
Afghanistan years after our mission there to deny Al Qaeda
the support of the Taliban, and even our search for Osama
Bin Laden, has ended.

Why Are We in
Afghanistan?

Journey to the Center of the Future

The Taliban
is sitting atop one of the world's few known concentrations
of Rare Earth Minerals
- in the case of the small village of Khan Neshin (below),
ceriumandneodymium - and that gives
these backwards Islamic fundamentalists a big say in the
future of the world's technological development. Weird,
right? It may also help explain why the U.S. is in
Afghanistan years after our mission there to deny Al Qaeda
the support of the Taliban, and even our search for Osama
Bin Laden, has ended.

By RAR

The
Moon colony in the Google satellite image above is Khan Neshin, Afghanistan,
in the Helmand Province
(southern part of the country). This has been the tough nut
to crack for the U.S. military, for the area remains largely
controlled by Taliban.
For
reference, see this "Map of Taliban Control", published by
the New York Times in December 2009, when the U.S. surged an
additional 30,000 troops into the Kabul area.

While the U.S. and its allies
have had little success in 10 years in terms of ridding the
country of Taliban influence - there have been ongoing talks
all along to determine how the Taliban could be brought into
a normalized Afghanistan government - there have been
militarily-secured campaigns by the U.S. Geological Survey to
map the region around Khan Neshin, which Russian scientists
have reported being a location of recoverable Rare Earth Minerals. The
USGS study team has located a sizable area of rocks in the
center of an extinct volcano containing light rare earth
elements including cerium and neodymium. It has mapped 1.3
million metric tons of desirable rock, or about 10 years of
supply at current demand levels. The Pentagon has estimated
its value at about $7.4 billion. (Simpson, S.: Afghanistan's
Buried Riches, "Scientific American", October 2011).

Rare Earth Minerals are oddly
named, because they exist in abundance throughout the
Earth's mantle. Rarely, however, do they exist in known
concentrations that makes mining them economically feasible.

China currently owns the Rare
Earth Minerals (REM) market, producing approximately 129,000
of the world's 132,000 metric tons of minerals extracted so
far. All indications are that China is not only ramping up
production of Rare Earth Minerals, which require
extraordinary ore refinement processes, but are also closing
down the market by halving the number of domestic and
Sino-foreign rare-earth producers and traders, thus
exploiting their monopoly and setting pricing worldwide.

The REM in Afghanistan represent
a powerful bargaining chip, not only for the Taliban who
control the Afghanistan ore deposits, but for the U.S.
government who can benefit from a source for these rare
minerals outside of China and can negotiate mining
operations that could help stabilize the southern part of
the country.

Throughout Afghanistan's long
history of civilization, it has been a crossroads for
looting empires from Hannibal to the current U.S.
occupation, and through its ongoing suppression it has been
unable to coalesce a tribal population into anything like a
whole nation. Beyond opium production, there is barely an
economy in Afghanistan.

Imagine the leap that ancient
country, against all odds, may be about to take into the
21st Century and beyond, almost as if they have been given a
chance to skip over the 20th Century entirely to hop-scotch
from pre-modern civilization to a science-fact future in a
single bound of dumb luck.
(052612)